10 ms·

Strangely this is a very a cultural thing. I'm from Australia and in summer the cooling can't cope and does indeed result in indoor temperatures exceeding 28°C

Strangely this is a very a cultural thing. I'm from Australia and in summer the cooling can't cope and does indeed result in indoor temperatures exceeding 28°C. However, I'm drenched in sweat and certainly can't focus at that point. I will happily head outside and enjoy the crazy heat, but be productive? Nope! I think heating and A/C target around 21°C in Melbourne. However, I traveled to Vienna for a week long contract some years back. Sure it was cold outside (snowing), but I found all the offices and buildings excruciatingly hot and couldn't focus one bit. Made for a very miserable working week. Of course, the locals all managed fine, so despite it seeming like a personal preference thing, I can only assume it's something you can adapt to.

weaksauce 7y ago
82 degrees F and drenched in sweat? man that's a nice day here in southern california.
- butteroverflow 7y ago
  The level of comfort also heavily depends on the level of humidity, doesn't it? Seems pointless to compare temperatures only. Would love to get all the complainers here to spend one month in winter where I live. We frequently have -35 to -45°C outside, and +30-35°C inside. How about a 70°C temperature difference?
  - jey 7y ago
    Why is it so warm inside?
    - butteroverflow 7y ago
      We have city-wide central heating system. If you don't pump (literally) boiling water into the system, it gets pretty cold in apartments furthest from the heating station. I live somewhere in between, so it gets even hotter the closer you live to the station. What do people do to combat this? They open the windows, and it's -40°C outside. This further lowers the efficiency of the whole system, so they get the water temperature even higher. Rinse and repeat. Of course, instead of opening the windows, you could always install a gate valve (or whatever it is called in English) and close it to make the water go through your apartment's heating elements without actually (mostly) heating them, and that's what they recommend, but why bother? The level of self-entitlement of many people here, you wouldn't believe. I could tell stories all day long. Like a caricature of a stereotypical American tourist.
      - fyfy18 7y ago
        That sounds ridiculously ineffeicient. My post-Soviet city has district heating, and similar temperatures, but usually bottoms out at -35c. In each building there is a system which takes the district heat and uses it to heat the water of the building. Both hot tap water and central heating. But the water is separate from district heat, so in each building the temperatures can be adjusted. In older buildings you still have the issue you describe on a macro level - apartments on the bottom floor are too hot, and on the top are too cold - but it doesn't matter how close or far your building is from the district heating station.
        butteroverflow 7y ago
        Yeah, they've been talking about implementing something like that for as long as I can remember. The current system wastes so much heat that it's always 10-15°C warmer in the city than outside its borders. I mean, how much coal do you have to burn to warm the air outside by 10-15°C? I am from an ex-Soviet city too, by the way.
        fri_sch 7y ago
        I think whoever is responsible for such a waste of resources should be held accountable for severe damage to the environment and the climate system.
        gambiting 7y ago
        By whom? They are given a job to provide heat for the city - and they are doing so. The people telling them to do that job are probably also the same people unwilling to schedule any budget to upgrade the system so make it more efficient.
        C1sc0cat 7y ago
        They are long retired or dead by now
        Gravityloss 7y ago
  - RomanBob 7y ago
    Where do you live exactly? What is the source of this heat energy?
    - butteroverflow 7y ago
      Sorry, I've spent enough time on the internet to know never to share any specific personal details. It's cheap low-quality coal with high sulfur content. The level of air pollution it produces is insane. In winter time you can feel the taste of coal on your tongue. The level of visibility is like 150-200 meters, after that it's a solid grey wall. Nobody here cares though, and if you do, you pick up your things and move elsewhere. That's what I am currently preparing to do.
      - h4waii 7y ago
        Very curious to know where this is. The most I've seen similar to this is above ground City-wide piped sewage and water in Inuvik. You'd have to be in a pretty small community, not a City, in maybe NU?
        Symbiote 7y ago
        I think it's much more likely to be somewhere in Russia, Kazakhstan etc.
        Fnoord 7y ago
        Yes, ex-Soviet [1] "I am from an ex-Soviet city too, by the way." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20322435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20322435
        h4waii 7y ago
        His original message definitely said Canada in it.
  - copperx 7y ago
    That sounds like the city is a power outage away from severe hypothermia or death, depending on the insulation of buildings. How are system failures handled?
    - butteroverflow 7y ago
      > How are system failures handled? By prayer. It happened a couple times, although not yet on the city scale. I don't personally know anyone who was affected. What they did, according to the local press, was stuffing every crack and cranny with old rags and sleeping fully clothed (as in fur coats and the like) and under as many blankets as they could get their hands on.
      - hvidgaard 7y ago
        If temperatures frequently get below -30C in the winter, one would think that getting a proper sleeping bag rated for that would be a no brainer.
        distances 7y ago
        It's extremely rare for heating to fail. I don't know of anyone who would've prepared specifically for this in Nordic countries.
        hvidgaard 7y ago
        It's not only for heating to fail. If your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere you could be in for a bad time if you cannot stay warm. It's standard advice to keep blankets or the like in your car for this specific scenario. Besides, for the majority of people in the Nordic contries, their normal winter comforter is warm enough to keep them warm should the heating fail.
        close04 7y ago
        I had to go to one of these cold places once for a couple of weeks. The car I was given was a modified Toyota Land Cruiser with two 100 liter tanks, additional insulation, additional battery inside, Webasto heater for both inside and engine compartment. It was also stocked with some useful stuff in case you do get stuck out in the middle of nowhere. Those people were ready, when you live your whole life in such environments you quickly get "infused" with a lot of experience that was accumulated over generations. So I'd be more worried about people in a regular country getting severe low temp weather than a failing heating system in one region used to extreme cold.
  - weaksauce 7y ago
    I mean I live near the ocean so it’s almost always pretty humid.
atoav 7y ago
Vienna in the summer is like a baking oven, the Austrians call it Hundstage (there is also a film by Ulrich Seidl called like that who has this heat as a topic). A lot of the buildings are able to cool passively e.g. by keeping open a window to hallway and to the street which in old buildings results in a steady airflow. Air condition only increases the cities temperature further so passive solutions are prefered.
- taejo 7y ago
  BTW, there is an English expression exactly corresponding to Hundstage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_days Apparently it originates in Latin so it's no surprise that it's shared between many European languages.
  - benj111 7y ago
    'Dog days', for those getting the link cut short.
    - marzell 7y ago
      FYI Hundstage literally translates to dog days. Hund = hound, tag = day.
  - timthorn 7y ago
    It comes from when Sirius (the "Dog Star") rises at the same time as the Sun - I think it is more about the astrological culture than the language, although that will be a vector.
  - w1nst0nsm1th 7y ago
    It's funny, because in french, there is : "un temps de chien". But it refers to heavily rainy days, not hot days.
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  Air conditioners don't generate much extra heat, they just move heat from inside to outside.
justinclift 7y ago
Interestingly (also generally Melb based), my ideal temp personally is 19C. Works well for much of the year, but summers can get a bit out of hand, depending on whether the aircon has sufficient capacity.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  Presently located in Launceston, typically have my heat pumps at home set to 19 while I’m awake, 17 when I sleep. I work in a workshop, so it’s both colder and warmer for longer depending on the season. The -4 degree mornings don’t effect my cognitive not physical abilities, but the 30+ degree days certainly do. I have to constantly remind myself to slow down.
  - nottorp 7y ago
    How's the shock when you go to 30 outside from 19 inside?
    - galangalalgol 7y ago
      It has been 41 here lately and I leave the indoors at 22, and the shock is marvelous. That 41 is at greater than 50% relative humidity, so the big impact is that my sweating starts to be effective again.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
      Oops. I mean I leave the heat on 19 during the cooler months. During summer here I’ll have the cooling set between 21 and 25.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- nso 7y ago
  Where I live in the tropics we have ~32 degrees every day all year. I put my AC on 27.5 and think that's more than cold enough. I guess the stable temperature makes the slight difference in temperature (and high difference in air humidity) more noticeable.
viraptor 7y ago
Mist fans are great for this. I just hope my laptop will cope with the humidity. But after AC can't help (32+C), mist fan is still effective. North of Melb.
gambiting 7y ago
Yeah, you'd think the places with very cold climates would have appropriately lower working temperature at the offices. Nope. Most sweltering offices I have ever been to were both in Canada and in Sweden in the middle of winter - easily -20C outside, and the office felt like it was set to 30C, it was insanely uncomfortable for me.
- nicoburns 7y ago
  This seems to work the other way too. Lot's of hot countries seem to set the AC to 18c. I did trip to south america, and I needed warm clothing specifically for air conditioned busses and dormitories. In the UK (where I live) I believe the recommended guideline is 21-24c
  - brokenkebab 7y ago
    Yes, I also noticed it in SE Asia. I guess, due to the fact that AC was (and in some places is) too expensive for the majority of population, cold air feels like a luxury attribute.
- k4lk 7y ago
  I had the opporsite experience at a conference in Australia. I ended up bringing a jacket to wear once we got inside.
- michaelmior 7y ago
  As a native Canadian, I haven't experienced this so it's a somewhat surprising data point to me. Although perhaps I'm just used to it :)
- johncalvinyoung 7y ago
  American here, from the South. I've noticed the same sort of phenomenon travelling to the Canadian plains in winter, or among Northern transplants to the South in midsummer. Canadian sitting rooms felt like greenhouses to me (80+ Fahrenheit) despite it being 20 below outside, and my boss has commented before on visiting Southern households where the A/C is set to 68 in July. My theory is that it's more about not-to-exceed ceilings [or the converse, floor] temperatures rather than average temperatures. When you have the huge temperature differential between the conditioned space and the outside, opening a door or something can affect the conditioned space's mean temperature by a huge amount for a short time. By over-conditioning or over-heating a space, you're more likely to be able to ensure the interior temperature never rises over ~75F, than if you'd set it at a comfortable 72F or so. Or in winter, it won't drop below a minimum comfortable temperature indoors when someone has to go outdoors. Of course, once you've adapted to that habit, you may not always make seasonable adjustments to those settings.
jsilence 7y ago
Pondering with rising wet bulb temperatures globally, whether Darwin will kick in and whether humans will evolve into a more heat resilient species. Natives in Nepal are adapted to lower oxygen, so why shouldn't that be possible?
- iamnotacrook 7y ago
  "humans will evolve into a more heat resilient species." Only if the ones who can't handle the higher temperature somehow die and/or struggle to reproduce, rather than turn up the air conditioning.
  - krzat 7y ago
    This will probably happen in Africa.
  - gurkendoktor 7y ago
    Epigenetics also play a role in our adaption: https://www.whatisepigenetics.com/exposure-to-cold-temperatures-can-change-our-gene-expression-and-fat-cells/ https://www.whatisepigenetics.com/exposure-to-cold-temperatu...
    - iamnotacrook 7y ago
      Intelligent Lamarckism?
- kilotaras 7y ago
  > why shouldn't that be possible? Evolution "cares" about one and only one thing - spreading of relevant genes. Technological advances means there's almost no difference in terms of procreation between more and less heat tolerant people.
- Aromasin 7y ago
  It would require conditions where those who are better adapted to higher temperature produce more offspring than those who aren't, consistently over many generations. The Nepalese would have developed this change over thousands, if not tens of thousand of years. The climate crisis is likely to come to a burning head in the next hundred. In all likelihood, we'll use technology to circumnavigate the issue and it will never get to the point where humans are put into a position where adaptation occurs.
systemtest 7y ago
Try to acclimate to high temperatures. In about a week or two you can easily handle 28 degrees without sweating. If that doesn’t work try lowering your body fat percentage. That’s also has a big impact on heat tolerance. Work in the cold too, in about two weeks my body accepts working at 16 degrees and I hardly have to heat my apartment.
rizzin 7y ago
I think average office people don't know how to use A/C and heating well. Every time I work in an office with a large and diverse enough population I have to endure stuffy warm air in winter and being blasted by cold wind in summer. I find it ridiculous, but, while wearing shorts, a t-shirt and sandals outside I have to keep a hoodie at my desk just to survive the office summer.
- staticvoidmaine 7y ago
  I relate to this so much. We are meant to adapt to our climate. Why do we resist so much? I ended up quoting osha regulation to ensure coworkers don’t turn the heat down below 68 degrees Fahrenheit. One coworker set it at 60 degrees at one point early this spring when it was a pleasant temperature outside. I biked in in shorts and a T-shirt and was shivering at my desk.
  - joshstrange 7y ago
    Haha I have the opposite issue and I also was quoting OSHA: > OSHA recommends temperature control in the range of 68-76° F and humidity control in the range of 20%-60%. When my desk thermometer started reading 76F+ Here is the thing, you can put on another layer of clothing or using a blanket, I cannot take off a layer of skin and my office does not allow for shorts/tank tops.
  - dfc 7y ago
    I thought OSHA caved on temperature standards. Did you quote a "suggestion" from OSHA?
- Angostura 7y ago
  I remember being seconded to Singapore for a bit back in the early 2000s. Second day there, I was scouring the shops for a warm sweater. At one point I was considering fingerless gloves.
- goda90 7y ago
  I hate that some people insist on cranking up the heat during the winter. Some of us wear the kinds of pants that will actually keep our legs warm out in freezing temperatures, and we shouldn't have to change into shorts to not be sweating at work.

weaksauce 7y ago

82 degrees F and drenched in sweat? man that's a nice day here in southern california.

butteroverflow 7y ago
The level of comfort also heavily depends on the level of humidity, doesn't it? Seems pointless to compare temperatures only. Would love to get all the complainers here to spend one month in winter where I live. We frequently have -35 to -45°C outside, and +30-35°C inside. How about a 70°C temperature difference?
- jey 7y ago
  Why is it so warm inside?
  - butteroverflow 7y ago
    We have city-wide central heating system. If you don't pump (literally) boiling water into the system, it gets pretty cold in apartments furthest from the heating station. I live somewhere in between, so it gets even hotter the closer you live to the station. What do people do to combat this? They open the windows, and it's -40°C outside. This further lowers the efficiency of the whole system, so they get the water temperature even higher. Rinse and repeat. Of course, instead of opening the windows, you could always install a gate valve (or whatever it is called in English) and close it to make the water go through your apartment's heating elements without actually (mostly) heating them, and that's what they recommend, but why bother? The level of self-entitlement of many people here, you wouldn't believe. I could tell stories all day long. Like a caricature of a stereotypical American tourist.
    - fyfy18 7y ago
      That sounds ridiculously ineffeicient. My post-Soviet city has district heating, and similar temperatures, but usually bottoms out at -35c. In each building there is a system which takes the district heat and uses it to heat the water of the building. Both hot tap water and central heating. But the water is separate from district heat, so in each building the temperatures can be adjusted. In older buildings you still have the issue you describe on a macro level - apartments on the bottom floor are too hot, and on the top are too cold - but it doesn't matter how close or far your building is from the district heating station.
      - butteroverflow 7y ago
        Yeah, they've been talking about implementing something like that for as long as I can remember. The current system wastes so much heat that it's always 10-15°C warmer in the city than outside its borders. I mean, how much coal do you have to burn to warm the air outside by 10-15°C? I am from an ex-Soviet city too, by the way.
        fri_sch 7y ago
        I think whoever is responsible for such a waste of resources should be held accountable for severe damage to the environment and the climate system.
        gambiting 7y ago
        By whom? They are given a job to provide heat for the city - and they are doing so. The people telling them to do that job are probably also the same people unwilling to schedule any budget to upgrade the system so make it more efficient.
        C1sc0cat 7y ago
        They are long retired or dead by now
        Gravityloss 7y ago
- RomanBob 7y ago
  Where do you live exactly? What is the source of this heat energy?
  - butteroverflow 7y ago
    Sorry, I've spent enough time on the internet to know never to share any specific personal details. It's cheap low-quality coal with high sulfur content. The level of air pollution it produces is insane. In winter time you can feel the taste of coal on your tongue. The level of visibility is like 150-200 meters, after that it's a solid grey wall. Nobody here cares though, and if you do, you pick up your things and move elsewhere. That's what I am currently preparing to do.
    - h4waii 7y ago
      Very curious to know where this is. The most I've seen similar to this is above ground City-wide piped sewage and water in Inuvik. You'd have to be in a pretty small community, not a City, in maybe NU?
      - Symbiote 7y ago
        I think it's much more likely to be somewhere in Russia, Kazakhstan etc.
        Fnoord 7y ago
        Yes, ex-Soviet [1] "I am from an ex-Soviet city too, by the way." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20322435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20322435
        h4waii 7y ago
        His original message definitely said Canada in it.
- copperx 7y ago
  That sounds like the city is a power outage away from severe hypothermia or death, depending on the insulation of buildings. How are system failures handled?
  - butteroverflow 7y ago
    > How are system failures handled? By prayer. It happened a couple times, although not yet on the city scale. I don't personally know anyone who was affected. What they did, according to the local press, was stuffing every crack and cranny with old rags and sleeping fully clothed (as in fur coats and the like) and under as many blankets as they could get their hands on.
    - hvidgaard 7y ago
      If temperatures frequently get below -30C in the winter, one would think that getting a proper sleeping bag rated for that would be a no brainer.
      - distances 7y ago
        It's extremely rare for heating to fail. I don't know of anyone who would've prepared specifically for this in Nordic countries.
        hvidgaard 7y ago
        It's not only for heating to fail. If your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere you could be in for a bad time if you cannot stay warm. It's standard advice to keep blankets or the like in your car for this specific scenario. Besides, for the majority of people in the Nordic contries, their normal winter comforter is warm enough to keep them warm should the heating fail.
        close04 7y ago
        I had to go to one of these cold places once for a couple of weeks. The car I was given was a modified Toyota Land Cruiser with two 100 liter tanks, additional insulation, additional battery inside, Webasto heater for both inside and engine compartment. It was also stocked with some useful stuff in case you do get stuck out in the middle of nowhere. Those people were ready, when you live your whole life in such environments you quickly get "infused" with a lot of experience that was accumulated over generations. So I'd be more worried about people in a regular country getting severe low temp weather than a failing heating system in one region used to extreme cold.
- weaksauce 7y ago
  I mean I live near the ocean so it’s almost always pretty humid.

atoav 7y ago

Vienna in the summer is like a baking oven, the Austrians call it Hundstage (there is also a film by Ulrich Seidl called like that who has this heat as a topic). A lot of the buildings are able to cool passively e.g. by keeping open a window to hallway and to the street which in old buildings results in a steady airflow. Air condition only increases the cities temperature further so passive solutions are prefered.

taejo 7y ago
BTW, there is an English expression exactly corresponding to Hundstage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_days Apparently it originates in Latin so it's no surprise that it's shared between many European languages.
- benj111 7y ago
  'Dog days', for those getting the link cut short.
  - marzell 7y ago
    FYI Hundstage literally translates to dog days. Hund = hound, tag = day.
- timthorn 7y ago
  It comes from when Sirius (the "Dog Star") rises at the same time as the Sun - I think it is more about the astrological culture than the language, although that will be a vector.
- w1nst0nsm1th 7y ago
  It's funny, because in french, there is : "un temps de chien". But it refers to heavily rainy days, not hot days.
rhinoceraptor 7y ago
Air conditioners don't generate much extra heat, they just move heat from inside to outside.

justinclift 7y ago

Interestingly (also generally Melb based), my ideal temp personally is 19C. Works well for much of the year, but summers can get a bit out of hand, depending on whether the aircon has sufficient capacity.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
Presently located in Launceston, typically have my heat pumps at home set to 19 while I’m awake, 17 when I sleep. I work in a workshop, so it’s both colder and warmer for longer depending on the season. The -4 degree mornings don’t effect my cognitive not physical abilities, but the 30+ degree days certainly do. I have to constantly remind myself to slow down.
- nottorp 7y ago
  How's the shock when you go to 30 outside from 19 inside?
  - galangalalgol 7y ago
    It has been 41 here lately and I leave the indoors at 22, and the shock is marvelous. That 41 is at greater than 50% relative humidity, so the big impact is that my sweating starts to be effective again.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    Oops. I mean I leave the heat on 19 during the cooler months. During summer here I’ll have the cooling set between 21 and 25.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
nso 7y ago
Where I live in the tropics we have ~32 degrees every day all year. I put my AC on 27.5 and think that's more than cold enough. I guess the stable temperature makes the slight difference in temperature (and high difference in air humidity) more noticeable.

viraptor 7y ago

Mist fans are great for this. I just hope my laptop will cope with the humidity. But after AC can't help (32+C), mist fan is still effective. North of Melb.

gambiting 7y ago

Yeah, you'd think the places with very cold climates would have appropriately lower working temperature at the offices. Nope. Most sweltering offices I have ever been to were both in Canada and in Sweden in the middle of winter - easily -20C outside, and the office felt like it was set to 30C, it was insanely uncomfortable for me.

nicoburns 7y ago
This seems to work the other way too. Lot's of hot countries seem to set the AC to 18c. I did trip to south america, and I needed warm clothing specifically for air conditioned busses and dormitories. In the UK (where I live) I believe the recommended guideline is 21-24c
- brokenkebab 7y ago
  Yes, I also noticed it in SE Asia. I guess, due to the fact that AC was (and in some places is) too expensive for the majority of population, cold air feels like a luxury attribute.
k4lk 7y ago
I had the opporsite experience at a conference in Australia. I ended up bringing a jacket to wear once we got inside.
michaelmior 7y ago
As a native Canadian, I haven't experienced this so it's a somewhat surprising data point to me. Although perhaps I'm just used to it :)
johncalvinyoung 7y ago
American here, from the South. I've noticed the same sort of phenomenon travelling to the Canadian plains in winter, or among Northern transplants to the South in midsummer. Canadian sitting rooms felt like greenhouses to me (80+ Fahrenheit) despite it being 20 below outside, and my boss has commented before on visiting Southern households where the A/C is set to 68 in July. My theory is that it's more about not-to-exceed ceilings [or the converse, floor] temperatures rather than average temperatures. When you have the huge temperature differential between the conditioned space and the outside, opening a door or something can affect the conditioned space's mean temperature by a huge amount for a short time. By over-conditioning or over-heating a space, you're more likely to be able to ensure the interior temperature never rises over ~75F, than if you'd set it at a comfortable 72F or so. Or in winter, it won't drop below a minimum comfortable temperature indoors when someone has to go outdoors. Of course, once you've adapted to that habit, you may not always make seasonable adjustments to those settings.

jsilence 7y ago

Pondering with rising wet bulb temperatures globally, whether Darwin will kick in and whether humans will evolve into a more heat resilient species. Natives in Nepal are adapted to lower oxygen, so why shouldn't that be possible?

iamnotacrook 7y ago
"humans will evolve into a more heat resilient species." Only if the ones who can't handle the higher temperature somehow die and/or struggle to reproduce, rather than turn up the air conditioning.
- krzat 7y ago
  This will probably happen in Africa.
- gurkendoktor 7y ago
  Epigenetics also play a role in our adaption: https://www.whatisepigenetics.com/exposure-to-cold-temperatures-can-change-our-gene-expression-and-fat-cells/ https://www.whatisepigenetics.com/exposure-to-cold-temperatu...
  - iamnotacrook 7y ago
    Intelligent Lamarckism?
kilotaras 7y ago
> why shouldn't that be possible? Evolution "cares" about one and only one thing - spreading of relevant genes. Technological advances means there's almost no difference in terms of procreation between more and less heat tolerant people.
Aromasin 7y ago
It would require conditions where those who are better adapted to higher temperature produce more offspring than those who aren't, consistently over many generations. The Nepalese would have developed this change over thousands, if not tens of thousand of years. The climate crisis is likely to come to a burning head in the next hundred. In all likelihood, we'll use technology to circumnavigate the issue and it will never get to the point where humans are put into a position where adaptation occurs.

systemtest 7y ago

Try to acclimate to high temperatures. In about a week or two you can easily handle 28 degrees without sweating. If that doesn’t work try lowering your body fat percentage. That’s also has a big impact on heat tolerance. Work in the cold too, in about two weeks my body accepts working at 16 degrees and I hardly have to heat my apartment.

rizzin 7y ago

I think average office people don't know how to use A/C and heating well. Every time I work in an office with a large and diverse enough population I have to endure stuffy warm air in winter and being blasted by cold wind in summer. I find it ridiculous, but, while wearing shorts, a t-shirt and sandals outside I have to keep a hoodie at my desk just to survive the office summer.

staticvoidmaine 7y ago
I relate to this so much. We are meant to adapt to our climate. Why do we resist so much? I ended up quoting osha regulation to ensure coworkers don’t turn the heat down below 68 degrees Fahrenheit. One coworker set it at 60 degrees at one point early this spring when it was a pleasant temperature outside. I biked in in shorts and a T-shirt and was shivering at my desk.
- joshstrange 7y ago
  Haha I have the opposite issue and I also was quoting OSHA: > OSHA recommends temperature control in the range of 68-76° F and humidity control in the range of 20%-60%. When my desk thermometer started reading 76F+ Here is the thing, you can put on another layer of clothing or using a blanket, I cannot take off a layer of skin and my office does not allow for shorts/tank tops.
- dfc 7y ago
  I thought OSHA caved on temperature standards. Did you quote a "suggestion" from OSHA?
Angostura 7y ago
I remember being seconded to Singapore for a bit back in the early 2000s. Second day there, I was scouring the shops for a warm sweater. At one point I was considering fingerless gloves.
goda90 7y ago
I hate that some people insist on cranking up the heat during the winter. Some of us wear the kinds of pants that will actually keep our legs warm out in freezing temperatures, and we shouldn't have to change into shorts to not be sweating at work.